European shares ended higher on Monday as merger and acquisition talk continued to swirl and a weaker euro helped shares in car makers. The FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European stocks finished up 0.52 percent at 1,456.68 points, the sixth successive higher close, as U.S. shares also gained thanks to takeover activity, according to Reuters. Merger and acquisition activity continued unabated, with Brazilian steelmaker CSN bidding $9.6 billion for Anglo-Dutch rival Corus, trumping an offer made only hours earlier by India's Tata Steel. Corus ended 5.5 percent higher on hopes a bid battle would lead to an even higher offer, lifting stocks across the steel sector, including Germany's ThyssenKrupp and Salzgitter. Shares in German tyremaker Continental rose nearly 3 percent despite Munich-based General Capital Group denying reports of interest in the company. Continued acquisition activity in Europe comes at the tail end of a record year for M&A in the region, and a spate of U.S. takeover deals reassured investors that companies were attractive purchases at current prices. Shares of blue-chip insurer American International Group rose, helping lift the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 0.2 percent, after Dubai Ports World said it would sell its U.S. port operations to an AIG unit. The tech-laced Nasdaq was up half a percentage point. With the FTSEurofirst 300 having gained more than 14 percent since the beginning of the year, analysts said they saw little to curb the rise in global stock prices. "There's nothing to knock stocks off their pedestal," said Bear Stearns economist David Brown. "There's increased appetite for risk, and people are thinking more constructively of a soft landing in the United States." Reuters polls showed that world stock markets were set to extend their bull run into 2007 but at a slower pace, held back by valuations and the uncertainty over the extent of a U.S. economic slowdown next year. CARS ROAR AHEAD After European markets closed, ex-Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan punctured the dollar by saying he expected the greenback to remain weak for a few years. The euro rose as high as $1.3255 after spending much of the day below $1.32. Earlier the DJ Stoxx European auto index gained 1.9 percent on the day, with major players in the dollar zone, such as DaimlerChrysler, BMW and Porsche all gaining more than 2 percent. Daimler, BMW and Continental helped lift Frankfurt's DAX index by 0.7 percent, and Paris's CAC-40 rose 0.8 percent. But London's FTSE 100 lagged other major European indexes, ending 0.12 percent higher as index heavyweight Royal Dutch/Shell lost 0.6 percent on a report that it would cede control of the Sakhalin-2 field to Gazprom.
